First few Article Sentences
Around the globe, approximately 56 million people die each year, including 3.4 million in the United States. In the year before COVID-19, around the world 18.6 million died from cardiovascular disease (700,000 in the U.S), 10 million from cancer (600,000 in the U.S.), 9 million from hunger, 1.2 million from road injuries and 759,000 from suicide. COVID-19 has killed almost one million lives to date in the U.S., but such numbers and statistics neither justify nor clarify the essence of death. Not only is death an amorphous concept, but few if any who write on the topic have actually experienced it.